HELEN CALDER
ANDRÉ HEMER
MIRANDA PARKES

gallery thirty three, Wanaka
27 October – 17 November 2006

Giant serene raindrop-like forms, vibrantly coloured scrawls and doodles, colourful canvases that contort and expand - all speak with adept idiosyncrasy of the many forms of expression alive in contemporary abstract painting. Freshpaint gathers together some of the most interesting and provocative New Zealand-born exponents: Helen Calder, André Hemer, Miranda Parkes.

Calder creates quiet, beautiful works tinged with a shyness that belies their ability to resonate with a contemplative strength. She plays with illusion and relationships between formal properties, spatial concerns and interior/exterior dynamics to ride that subtle line of tension between vulnerability and strength of presence. Traditionally painting served to demarcate the interior space and acted as a ‘window’ through to the outside world. Calder’s paintings turn this illusion literally upside down – the raindrop formed by the dual agents of gravity and the viscosity of paint – creating an ‘up and down’ illusion instead of an ‘into and through’. These works are more ‘coverings’ than ‘windows’, and in another twist they invoke the blues of the canals and lakes of the region then disrupt this with an alien colour.

André Hemer’s raw canvases are rife with an abundance of candy colours that stretch, group and explode into perfected patterns of apparent randomness. The splotch, daub, dribble and blob forms are taken with a wry smile from the history of abstract painting which is then parodied at least threefold. In the first instance the composition is created digitally then rendered in paint, secondly the works (and colours used) spring from a delight in humour and play in lieu of modernist seriousness and thirdly an awareness of commodification and fickle fashion lends both a knowing temporality and inspires the catchy titles.

Where Hemer makes a break with modernist abstraction in the use of digital technologies and playful intervention, Miranda Parkes launches beyond the formidable rectangular format of the canvas and into palpable three-dimensional space. The canvases curl, scrunch, ripple, ruche, crumple and bubble their way forward into the viewer’s space. Here, the precision of the vertical line so beloved of modernist painters is caught up in the undertow and torn beautifully asunder.
And as some of the titles such as Stalker, Snooper and Watcher suggest the roles are reversed and it is the works themselves who are doing the surveillance. Parkes’ oeuvre plays with the boundaries where painting and sculpture might meet if they were to depart from their recognisable homes and converge upon each other.

Helen Calder
Slide 1, 2006
enamel and acrylic on board, 910 x 750 mm

Helen Calder
Slide 2, 2006
enamel and acrylic on board, 910 x 750 mm

Andre Hemer
The Voluptuous Vector Vixens, 2005
acrylic on canvas, 1200 x 1200 mm

Miranda Parkes
Jumper, 2006
acrylic on canvas, 1030 x 1090 x 300 mm

Miranda Parkes
Stalker, 2006
acrylic on canvas, 1040 x 1090 x 360 mm

Miranda Parkes
Hummer, 2006
acrylic on pvc, 420 x 420 x 120 mm

Miranda Parkes
Snooper, 2006
oil on canvas, 290 x 280 x 290 mm

Miranda Parkes
Watcher, 2006
oil on canvas, 360 x 270 x 260 mm

Miranda Parkes
Hatcher, 2006
oil on canvas, 100 x 100 x 97 mm